The intention of Oracle’s (www.oracle.com) acquisition of Hyperion (www.hyperion.com) (see Press Release), is more complex than simply a technology acqusition or the purchase of a strong client list.
It is clear that Oracle stands to benefit in several areas. First, the best of breed financial applications of Hyperion will clearly remain intact and lead the BPM application charge for Oracle.
Second, access to Hyperion’s extensive SAP customer base will give Oracle access to the many finance departments who use Hyperion for consolidated financial statements from SAP and other systems.
The question remains, what will happen to the Hyperion BI tool product set.
SQR customers (Hyperion Production Reporting) will certainly be safe. With Oracle’s acquisition of PeopleSoft and PeopleSoft’s extensive use of SQR, the product finally comes home again to PeopleSoft customers.
With Interactive Reporting (the former Brio product), it is unclear as to whether Oracle’s Business Intelligence Suite Enterprise Edition (OBI) (the former Siebel Analytics app) will win out. Or… (more likely) will IR be integrated into the platform for a powerful Analytic reporting tool.
The strength of the the OBI platform is in the datamart and strong integration with financial applications. Adding the Hyperion IR product to the stack will certainly make a very strong analytics platform.
If Oracle extends the OBI platform to include IR while leveraging Hyperion’s financial applications (Planning, Financial Management, Enterprise) while extending it’s BI reporting and analytics, and at the same time, leveraging Hyperion’s Master Data Management product, they will be a tough company to beat in the BI/BPM space.
And in a future discussion, we’ll talk about what will happen to Essbase.